The incident is the latest in a string of U.S. airstrikes in which civilians have been killed. It comes at a bad time for the U.S. military, which has been working hard to soothe tensions with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government over the shooting of a copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, by a U.S. soldier earlier this month.

United Nations officials have expressed concern at the number of civilians killed in airstrikes in Iraq and said more care must be taken in military operations to protect them. [...]

Iraqi police have raised questions about another operation by U.S. forces in Baghdad on Wednesday in which 11 people were killed. The U.S. military has said its troops shot dead 11 militants, but police and several residents said at least some of the dead were civilians killed by U.S. snipers.

Hey, they're all militants. You live in Iraq under occupation by American Liberators and you don't like it? (Caution: pdf file) By definition that makes you a militant. And as we all know, the US military only kills militants. Because they really care about innocent human life. Most of the time anyway ...

"There were two boys, one was eight and the other was 11," said police Major Ahmed Hussein, giving the ages of two of the victims.

A doctor at Baiji hospital who asked not to be named said it had received eight bodies following the incident early on Wednesday evening. One body was that of a 60-year-old man.

In October 2007, the United Nations mission in Iraq urged U.S. forces to pursue a "vigorous" probe into an airstrike that killed 15 women and children and said its findings must be made public so that lessons could be learned.

They were killed during an operation targeting senior leaders of al Qaeda in the Lake Thar Thar area 80 km (50 miles) northwest of the Iraqi capital. The U.S. military has not made public its investigations into such incidents.

Hey, what the public doesn't know, it doesn't need to know. Especially the American public. All we need to know is that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, as long as those Nazi appeasing Democrats don't get elected this Fall.

The Republican presidential contender, in a mystical speech that also envisioned Osama bin Laden dead or captured, and Americans with the choice of paying a simple flat tax or following their standard 1040 form, said only a small number of troops would remain in Iraq by the end of a prospective first term because al-Qaida will have been defeated and Iraq's government will be functioning on its own.

"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won," McCain told an audience of several hundred here in the capital city of a general election battleground state.

And he's right you know. If we stay long enough, and kill enough people, we're bound to win the war. I figure another 20 million dead ought to do the trick, don't you? A small price to pay for victory in Iraq and the expansion of peace, freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We just have to have the will to finish what George Bush started.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about "the false selling of the Iraq War. We were railroaded into an unnecessary war." Fine, I agree. Now what? Krugman just goes on to the next paragraph. But if Bush falsely railroaded the nation into a war where over 100,000 people died, including 4,000 American soldiers, how can you go on to the next paragraph as if you had been writing that Bush spent the weekend at Camp David with his wife? For doing what Krugman believes Bush did, doesn't Bush have to be punished commensurately in some way? Are there no consequences for committing a crime of colossal proportions?

To answer Mr. Bugliosi's question for him, it's no crime if we win the war. Everybody knows that. So let the killing continue under President McCain. Being a former aviator I'm sure he'll have few qualms about using even more air strikes to "plow the field" as it were in order to create a new, safer and less populated Iraq with freedom and justice for all -- American "businessmen," that is. And hey, with oil at $130 a barrel and rising, the less Iraqis the better for the backbone of our economy, the American oil companies. To paraphrase an old but still relevant quote, "what's good for Exxon Mobil is good for America."

At least, that's what any true, full blooded American patriot would want, isn't it?